I Love The Internet

Some weeks, the internet seems to be full of more awesome than usual. Maybe everything is always so awesome, I’m just not always paying attention. This week, I paid attention. This week, I totally love the internet.

“It’s a special sort of condescending love we’ve reserved for the gay community. We’ll agree to love them, accept them, welcome them – but we reserve the right to see them as different. We reserve the right to say “them” instead of “us”. We embrace them with arms full of disclaimers about how all the sinners are welcome here. And yet, they’re the only ones we constantly remind of their status as sinners, welcome sinners.”

“A few years ago, in the midst of a stretch of trying days—the kind of grinding, endless days where it was all I could do not to carve the words HELP ME into the living room wall with a bloody whisk—my life touched a good thing in the form of a blue-eyed girl with a charming lisp. She helped me re-find possibility during a week when everything was dark and negative, a week when I was ready to go out and buy a VW van so I could drive off into the sunset, cranking Neil Young and savoring the melancholy of dusk. This girl was nine; she wanted to be an actress; she liked to catch tadpoles; and she has Type I diabetes.”

“Because Jay’s friendship wasn’t about gender, not when I met him and not when I found out about his transition. Or his pregnancy. Or his cancer. Friendships aren’t usually about gender. Who Jay was for me is entirely defined by what kind of friend he was. And that wasn’t based on anatomy or hormone profile or what existed under his clothes. It was based on his heart.”

“Pregnant and on bed rest, unable to sleep at night myself, I’d hear her feet hit the floor at one o’clock in the morning. She’d stomp into the bathroom and run herself a hot bath. For a while, the sounds would cease as she likely attempted to relax herself back to sleep. Later, she’d stomp back to bed, waking me yet again. I’d roll to my other side, hand gently touching my belly as the Munchkin kicked me. My precious daughter was a night owl as well.”